The Internet is experiencing one of the most significant changes since its creation in the 1980s. New services are launched every day, creating new sources of personalized data collected by increasingly sophisticated devices featuring multiple sensors that measure everything possible in real-time. The explosion of data is so drastic that Telco companies are expecting a 10-fold increase in mobile network traffic within the next few years.
All collected data will create more online services that will provide consumers with increasingly more personalized experiences. However, data collection could be also abusive for end-users. For instance, the behavior of end-users in one website could be monitored by tracking mechanisms and used to show targeted advertisements on other websites, without any end-user's concern.
Most of online services do provide mechanisms that end-users could OPT-OUT tracking mechanisms so prevent targeting service optimizations. For example, Google provides mechanisms to allow end-users to disable its analytic service, so user's visits to different web sites are not reported. Almost all OPT-OUT mechanisms are based on creating a specific cookie in the browser that indicates the desire of the end-user to be not tracked.
However, such OPT-OUT mechanisms are most of the cases not simple to use or end-users are just not aware of their existence. Different tracking entities use different cookies and there is not any mechanism/agreement that allows end-users to OPT-OUT to all entities.
Furthermore, most of mechanisms are not persistent and end-users automatically OPT-IN again to the data collection whenever they reset the history of their devices or web browsers. Depending on implementation of browsers and the allocated capacity for store cookies, OPT-OUT cookies could be removed automatically, when there is a shortage in the capacity.
All already mentioned factors and others such as name changes of the OPT-OUT cookie, domain changes or even new trackers, make the current OPT-OUT mechanism difficult to use for end-users.
Even though, there exist software's that could be installed in end-user devices that could help opt-out process, such software's are not always available in all the devices.
In order to help end-users to OPT-OUT online tracking mechanisms, different solutions are available in the market.
Most of solutions are based on installing software in the end-user devices. Specifically, a plug-in in the browser that end-user has in the device. For instance, AdBlock Plus plug-in is available for most popular browsers, such as Microsoft Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. The community of AdBlock Plus maintains a database of online trackers that is constantly updated with crowdsourcing effort.
Other popular plug-ins that is specific for tracking prevention is Ghostery. In this case, the solution maintains a list of around two thousand trackers and invites end-users to share information to discover new trackers.
Other solutions such as NoScript allow end-users to stop the execution of JavaScript that are identified as tracking mechanisms. TrackerBlock, in other hand, maintains a list of 500 trackers and blocks identification information in HTML5 storage. Some tracking companies indeed do also provides software-based solutions such as the one proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,370,475 to keep the end-users' choice to be OPT-OUTed.
Software based solutions are effective to OPT-OUT tracking mechanisms and their effectiveness depends strongly on the accuracy of the database that list the online trackers. The main drawback of this kind of solutions is the fact that is not universal. For instance, some browsers, such as Safary®, do not allow third party plug-ins. The solution is neither available in all environments. Solutions such as AdBlock Plus are not available in Android® ecosystem. Other disadvantage of software-based solutions is the fact that they require computational resources in the end-users devices. Whereas this is not a problem in desktop environment, it becomes a huge barrier for adoption in mobile devices.
Different online tracking companies do also response to the social concerns by offering OPT-OUT options to end consumers, by providing a centralized way to test the current OPT-OUT status for different trackers. The basic mechanism behind is similar to the test system that is proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,793,534 B2. Furthermore, the web site allows end-users to select which tracker they want to OPT-IN to share the behavior information.
The advantage of this option is collaboration nature between end consumers and tracking companies. However, this option is not always well known for end-users and are neither easy to use. For instance, OPT-OUT mechanisms of different tracking companies are not identical and should be done case by case. Other disadvantage is the non-persistence of the OPT-OUT option that does provide software based solution.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,387 B2 it is proposed to use a network element to send cookie with privacy flag, when end-users want to OPT-OUT. Such a solution, however, doesn't work when behavior tracking is performed using end-to-end Encrypted Hyper text Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) connections, where network element can't see or modify the traffic between end-user and origin server.